Carrie Chapman Catt founded the New York State Woman Suffrage Party in 1909 at the Convention of Disfranchised Women. By 1915, the Woman Suffrage Party had 100,000 members, and that summer, suffragists organized 5,225 outdoor meetings, 13 concerts, and 28 parades and processions. A referendum in October 1915 lost, when 58 percent of the male voters in New York rejected suffrage for women.

Undaunted, the Woman Suffrage Party used American participation in World War I as an additional reason that men should vote for suffrage. They canvassed from door to door with petitions, urging men to sign in favor of woman suffrage, and this ticket was directed at male voters to demonstrate to nervous politicians in Albany the extent of male support for women’s suffrage. One suffrage periodical reported, “Meantime, in the cities, in the villages, in every up-State county, women are going about quietly, persistently, systematically, visiting every man, and asking him to sign a little yellow slip reading, ‘I believe that the vote should be granted to the women of New York in 1915.’ These yellow slips are heaping up like so much golden grain in headquarters.”[1] This version does not have “in 1915” printed on it, which may suggest it was from the later campaign in 1917.

The Woman Suffrage Party organized hierarchically, like Tammany Hall, to maintain both centralized direction and close contact with individuals. It also published The Woman Voter as its official journal from 1910 to 1917. Although the Party lobbied for women’s suffrage, it opposed the confrontational protests by some suffragists outside the White House during much of 1917, believing that they tended to “harass the Government in this time of great stress.”

In March 1917, the New York legislature granted the suffragists a second chance to submit their amendment to the voters in November of that year. The Woman Suffrage Party raised more than $400,000 for the 1917 referendum, calling on very wealthy families to donate.

On November 6, 1917, men in New York went to the polls to decide whether women should have the right to vote. The referendum passed by a vote of 703,129 to 600,776 (54 to 46 percent). Although the referendum failed upstate by 1,570 votes, New York City approved it by a margin of 103,863. Catt later declared that the campaign in New York State was the decisive battle of the American woman suffrage movement, leading Congress to propose the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.